Azure Static Web Hosting Costs (2026) 🔥 by Traffic
Compare Azure static website hosting costs (2026) by traffic—find the best Static Web Apps pricing or Azure Blob + Front Door setup. Avoid bill surprises!
What Does a Static Website Really Cost on Azure?
Static websites have a deserved reputation for being cheap to host. There's no application server to keep running, and the files themselves usually don't take much storage. But "static" doesn't mean "free at every scale." On Azure, a site can cost $0, around $9 a month, or well over $1,800. The big driver isn't how much disk your files take up - it's how much data visitors download and how many requests your setup handles along the way.
That matters when you pick a hosting product. Azure Static Web Apps is convenient and usually inexpensive for smaller sites, but it comes with storage limits and a shared free-bandwidth allowance. Blob Storage can be cheaper per gigabyte, but it doesn't include the same full production setup by itself. Put Azure Front Door in front of Blob Storage and you get a CDN plus HTTPS for a custom domain, at the cost of a fixed monthly charge and request fees.
This guide compares the practical options using five site sizes, shows where the cost crossover tends to land, and walks you through a simple way to estimate your own monthly bill.
The Azure hosting options
For a static website, the useful comparison is between Azure Static Web Apps (SWA), Blob Storage serving files directly, and Blob Storage behind Azure Front Door. These options solve different problems. If you only compare the headline storage or bandwidth rates, it's easy to choose something that looks cheap but won't work well for a real production site.
The figures below use public US-dollar list prices from the Azure Retail Prices API for East US / Zone 1, based on an October 2026 pricing snapshot. These are estimates, not a quote. Region, currency, taxes, your exact configuration, and future price changes can shift the numbers. If you're budgeting, double-check with the Azure pricing calculator.
| Hosting option | What it provides | Fixed monthly cost | Transfer pricing used in this comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static Web Apps Free | Managed static hosting, CI/CD, TLS, and global distribution | $0 | No paid overage; service stops serving at the cap |
| Static Web Apps Standard | Managed hosting with higher limits and an SLA | $9 per app | $0.20 per GB after the included 100 GB |
| Blob Storage static website | Files served from a storage account's $web container |
About $0 | $0.087 per GB after the first 100 GB |
| Blob Storage + Front Door Standard | Blob origin with Azure Front Door in front | $35 | $0.0825 per GB for the first 10 TB, plus request charges |
The Blob figures include assumptions about the applicable free transfer allowance and request volume. They're not "universal rates" for every configuration. One common gotcha: if your site has lots of small files, request charges can matter even when total transfer stays modest.
What the product limits mean in practice
Static Web Apps' storage and bandwidth limits can decide the hosting choice before you even look at per-GB rates. In this pricing snapshot:
- Free allows 250 MB per environment and 500 MB across environments.
- Standard allows 500 MB per environment and 2 GB across environments.
- Both plans list a 15,000-file limit.
- The included 100 GB of bandwidth is shared at the subscription level, not granted separately to each app.
That last part is easy to miss. Five Free-plan sites don't each get their own 100 GB allowance if they share one subscription - your traffic all draws from the same pool.
There's also an availability difference. Free has no paid overage. When the bandwidth limit is reached, the site stops being served. Standard has paid overage instead, so a traffic spike becomes a higher bill - not an outage.
You can review current limits in the Azure Static Web Apps quotas documentation. The operational question isn't just "What's the rate?" It's "What happens when I cross the limit?"
Why Blob Storage alone is not always a production answer
Blob Storage's static website feature can be very cheap for the files themselves. Hot storage is around $0.021 per GB-month in the assumptions used here, so storing 5 GB is roughly ten cents. In practice, though, storage cost is rarely the main issue for a public site.
Here are the constraints that usually push people away from "Blob direct" for production:
- HTTPS on your custom domain: Blob static website hosting doesn't provide HTTPS for a custom domain by itself. For a production URL like
https://example.com, you generally need Front Door (or another fronting service) in front of the storage account. - No CDN when serving directly: A direct Blob endpoint serves from the storage account's region. That can mean higher latency for users farther away, and you don't get a globally distributed edge layer from the storage website endpoint alone.
- No automatic compression: Files are served as uploaded. If you want gzip or Brotli, you need to arrange compression and set the correct
Content-Encodingmetadata, or use a delivery layer that compresses responses.
Direct Blob hosting can still be a decent fit for low-risk internal use, test assets, or cases where the provided endpoint is acceptable. For a typical public site with a custom domain and HTTPS, compare SWA against Blob Storage plus Front Door instead. The Front Door pricing page is where you'll want to verify current rates and the billing dimensions.
App Service usually isn't a good alternative for a "static-only" site. Even a small Linux B1 plan adds server cost, and you still need a distribution strategy for the files. You end up paying for a web server you don't really need.
And the classic Azure CDN is not a good basis for a new deployment either: it stopped accepting new profiles in August 2025 and is scheduled to retire on September 30, 2027.
What five site sizes cost
A workable estimate needs both traffic and request volume. The examples below assume roughly:
- 1 MB transferred per page view
- about 20 requests per MB
That implies an average request size of around 50 KB. Real sites vary - caching, image weight, JavaScript bundles, browser behavior, and repeat visitors can all move the numbers a lot.
| Example site | Stored files | Approx. file count | Monthly transfer | Approx. page views |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio | 30 MB | 300 | 5 GB | 5,000 |
| Blog or documentation site | 200 MB | 3,000 | 50 GB | 50,000 |
| Busy tools site | 450 MB | 8,000 | 400 GB | 400,000 |
| Popular site | 1.5 GB | 25,000 | 3 TB | 3 million |
| Very popular site | 5 GB | 100,000 | 20 TB | 20 million |
These assumptions are intentionally simple; they're not a promise that one page view always costs 1 MB. Analytics, downloads, bot traffic, and other non-pageview traffic can increase requests or transfer in ways that don't map neatly to page views. If you have CDN or storage logs, use them. If you don't, start conservative.
Here's the estimated monthly cost under those assumptions:
| Example site | SWA Free | SWA Standard | Blob direct | Blob + Front Door |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio | $0 | $9 | $0.04 | $35.51 |
| Blog or documentation site | $0 | $9 | $0.40 | $40.05 |
| Busy tools site | Over 100 GB | $69 | $29.31 | $75.37 |
| Popular site | Over limit | Too large; about $589 if it fit | $276 | $338 |
| Very popular site | Over limit | Too large; about $3,989 if it fit | $1,853 | $1,869 |
One key takeaway: the cheapest practical option isn't always the lowest number in the table. Blob direct is the lowest raw option in several rows, but it doesn't meet the custom-domain HTTPS requirement discussed earlier. For a conventional public production site, the comparison usually comes down to SWA versus Blob Storage behind Front Door.
What the numbers do - and don't - include
This table is a model, not an "invoice forecast." It assumes a single region and a specific request-to-transfer ratio. Your actual bill can depend on transfer tiering, cache hit rate, request type, origin reads, logging, DNS, and other services in your architecture.
The small sites make this especially obvious: a $35 monthly Front Door base charge can outweigh the cost of serving a few gigabytes.
At higher volumes, data transfer becomes the biggest line item - but requests still matter. Under the stated assumption, 20 TB of transfer corresponds to roughly 400 million requests. At $0.009 per 10,000 requests, that's about $360 in request charges before you even get to egress. Blob read requests can also add up; the same volume at $0.004 per 10,000 reads would be about $160.
Static Web Apps doesn't use the same per-request meter as in this comparison, which is one reason its total cost can stay competitive even when its headline per-GB overage looks higher. A site with lots of small assets can have a different cost profile than a site serving fewer, larger files.
The practical break-even point
Once you're past the Free plan, the simplest comparison is between these approximate cost models:
- SWA Standard: $9 plus $0.20 for each GB above the included 100 GB.
- Blob Storage + Front Door: $35 fixed, plus about $0.10 per GB once egress and the assumed request charges are combined.
With those assumptions, the crossover is around 460 GB per month. Below that, SWA Standard is usually cheaper and simpler. Above that, Front Door can become cheaper, and the gap tends to grow with traffic. At around 3 TB per month, these estimates put SWA at roughly 1.7x the Front Door option - assuming the site would still fit SWA's storage and file limits.
This isn't a universal threshold. If your average file size, request rate, geography, or cache behavior changes, the crossover moves. Treat 460 GB as a useful decision point for this model, not a guarantee from Azure.
A practical decision ladder
| Your site's situation | Likely starting choice | Approximate monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 250 MB, no more than 15,000 files, and within the shared 100 GB subscription allowance | SWA Free | $0 |
| Up to 500 MB and 15,000 files, with traffic up to roughly 460 GB | SWA Standard | $9-$81 under these assumptions |
| More than 500 MB, more than 15,000 files, or sustained traffic above roughly 460 GB | Blob Storage + Front Door Standard | $35 plus about $0.10 per GB in this model |
This ladder separates two questions that people often mix up: disk size determines which limits you can meet; traffic determines what you pay. Request volume is a third factor that can swing the economics, especially when files are small or caching isn't doing much.
It's also worth setting expectations: you might assume cost per GB drops sharply as traffic grows. In this example, Front Door's egress rate does drop after the first 10 TB (to $0.065 per GB). But at 20 TB, the fixed charge stops being the main story. The real issue becomes bandwidth and request costs. At that scale, reducing what you send and what you ask the edge to process tends to matter more than arguing over a few dollars of storage.
How to reduce and monitor the bill
You have more control over the bill than the "headline rate" suggests. The biggest wins usually come from: sending fewer bytes, reducing repeated requests, and catching growth early.
Reduce the data visitors download
Start with images. They're often the largest part of most pages. Serve them at the dimensions you actually display, and use modern formats like AVIF or WebP when your browser support needs allow it. A smaller image isn't just a faster page - it's less billable transfer for uncached visits.
Enable compression for text assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SVG where it makes sense. Static Web Apps handles compression for you. With Front Door, verify compression is enabled on the routes you care about. With direct Blob hosting, upload pre-compressed files and set the Content-Encoding metadata correctly. Skip compression and text assets can chew through several times the transfer they "should" need.
Reduce unnecessary requests
Fingerprint build assets (for example, app.3f9a1c.js) and give them a long-lived cache policy like Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable. When the file changes, the fingerprint changes too - so browsers can safely reuse the old version until the new reference appears.
Also look at how many separate assets you ship. Even a small SVG icon becomes a request if it's a standalone file. That doesn't mean "inline everything." Oversized HTML and messy builds have their own costs. But you can reduce repeat requests by consolidating tiny assets, subsetting fonts, and using a variable font instead of lots of font files.
The goal isn't to chase some theoretical minimum request count. It's to avoid serving the same unchanged assets again and again because cache headers are missing or filenames aren't versioned.
Set limits, then inspect real invoices
SWA Free has an operational cliff: once the shared bandwidth allowance is used up, the site can stop serving. If uptime matters, monitor usage and decide before launch whether you need to move to Standard. Also remember: one "successful" Free site can burn through the shared allowance that other Free apps in the same subscription rely on.
Set an Azure Cost Management budget and alerts before you go live. Budget alerts aren't spending caps - they just tell you when costs hit a threshold. That distinction matters. Pair alerts with someone (or a process) to respond, and set the threshold low enough to leave time to investigate.
Finally, review the first invoices carefully. Compare each line item to the meters you expect: bandwidth, requests, storage, plus any edge or monitoring services. If your total is several times higher than your estimate, it's often a configuration or usage mismatch - not some mysterious "hosting surcharge." The Azure pricing calculator helps for planning, but your invoice and usage data are the evidence of what your deployment actually did.
Conclusion
Azure static hosting is cheap when your site is small, but the bill changes as traffic, file count, and product limits come into play. If your site fits within the limits, Static Web Apps Free is hard to beat - as long as you monitor the shared bandwidth allowance. If you need more headroom but still stay under the approximate crossover, Standard is a straightforward managed option. For larger sites or sustained high traffic, Blob Storage behind Front Door is usually the better fit, but it's worth pricing carefully.
Before you choose, check three things: your total stored files and file count, your expected monthly transfer, and the request volume your assets imply. Then verify current regional rates and set a budget alert. If you already know your monthly transfer and rough request count, use those to place yourself on the decision ladder instead of guessing based on the word "static."